Posted 2 years ago on Oct. 6, 2012, 5:41 a.m. EST by Builder
(4202)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

For mine, the real trouble with money started when someone convinced our government to sell all of the gold that was the "standard" behind the intrinsic value of our money, and float our money on the international stock exchange.

That was when the rot set in.

I'm talking about Australian currency, which is currently worth so much, it's cheaper for me to buy builder's tools from the US, and have them shipped to Australia.

Used to be, not so long ago, that Australian dollars were never worth more than about seventy cents US.

That's one of the troubles with money. It's now so cheap for me to buy stuff from your country, that my retailers are gonna go broke. Not such a big issue, when I realise that a lot of "my" big retailers are actually offshore companies, pretending to be homies.

I hear that outsourcing is gonna kill off capitalism, and allow the developing nations to end up taking over the established western nations, and those individuals that are selling off our assetts will be resettling their fat asses in the southern hemisphere, to avoid the future "scourge" of the north.

13 Comments

Tell me it ain't so! Australia??? But I'm told that Australia has mandatory voting. I'm told that high voter turnout prohibits big money domination of a national economy. You must be lying! Surely all of the Democrat supporters on this forum who support the 'Vote n Hope' strategy can prove you're lying. After all, high voter turnout must somehow magically result in national economic prosperity. It just has to! The Democrat posters said so!

As I'm sure you know, it's not the money that's the problem, it's those who control the money. A very rich man once said to the effect:

"Give me control of a nation's currency, and I care not who makes the laws."

Years later, an American president lamented:

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men."

Money doesn't have an "intrinsic value". Money mearly serves as a representation of things with intrinsic value. Since the Great Depression occurred under the gold standard, one might assume the "rot" had set in before the fact.

It's not that simple. Gold has no fixed value. I think the bigger risk is deflation. Again, I draw your attention to the Great Depression. How do you explain that, since that occurred with the gold standard in place?

Money simply represents the natural resources of a country. It does not only represent gold, but all other resources as well. The problem arises when a country fails to properly represent their resources by either printing too much money, or too little. We need this form of abstraction, because, without it, it would be impossible to achieve forms of trade more complex than eggs for a chicken. The advantage is being able to trade in much more complex ways, the disadvantage is that it's near impossible to properly estimate resources since they keep changing. What we need is not to get ride of money, but to find ways to make better estimate what resources we have.